Nicholas Enrich was in Kenya when the George W. Bush administration committed $15 billion to fight HIV, a defining moment in his career as a young American aid worker. More than two decades later, he watched that same organization get torn apart.
Enrich has now published a detailed account of what happened when a new administration arrived with an "America first" ideology and plans to remake America's international presence. His book, "Into the Wood Chipper," takes its title from Elon Musk's comment on the effort to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
The speed was stunning. Within days of taking office last January, Donald Trump paused USAID funding. Two months later, dissolution was formally announced. By July, with over 80 percent of programs canceled, the agency merged into the State Department, ending an era that began when John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961 as a strategic instrument of foreign policy.
"I wanted to let people know what happened and however bad they thought that it might be inside USAID when Doge came in to tear it apart, it was way worse," Enrich writes, pointing to what he describes as incompetence, ignorance, and cruelty underlying the effort.
The human toll is staggering. Oxfam estimates that at least 23 million children will lose access to education and as many as 95 million people will lose basic healthcare access, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths annually.
For Enrich, an expert in drug-resistant tuberculosis who served as acting assistant administrator for global health, the experience exposed troubling dynamics. When he issued a memo in March 2025 outlining the risks of freezing foreign aid, he was placed on administrative leave fewer than 30 minutes later.
What struck Enrich most was the nature of those driving the changes. "It looked like a group of unqualified people that came in to replace decades of expertise and tore down an agency," he says. Adam Korzeniewski, the White House liaison to USAID, asked agency officials to create simple slides to help political leadership understand the dangers of halting tuberculosis clinical trials. The implication was clear: existing expertise was being dismissed as overly complex.
Misinformation permeated the process. Trump appointees claimed USAID provided abortions, despite strict legal prohibitions. "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," Enrich says. "But it was one of the concerns of Republican members of Congress."
More troubling still was what Enrich describes as deliberate dishonesty. "I started to recognize how often and critically administration officials were lying about what was happening inside USAID," he says, citing Elon Musk's visit to the White House to claim that Ebola activities had been restarted on the same day the Doge team had canceled the relevant contracts.
Some officials appeared motivated by personal grievance. Mark Lloyd, who led USAID's bureau for conflict prevention and stabilization, claimed that career staff had killed his dog during the first Trump administration when he served as the agency's religious freedom adviser. "He was excited to get rid of USAID staff because he really considered them to be pet murderers," Enrich writes.
The dismantling has national security implications Enrich considers severe. USAID had invested hundreds of millions in early-warning systems to detect potential disease outbreaks at their origin before spreading globally. "Our inability to detect outbreaks and prevent the next outbreak is a threat to national security," Enrich says. The suspension of drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment trials compounds the danger.
The damage extends beyond American borders. Other donor nations have mirrored U.S. cuts to development aid. "When we turn our backs on the world, and break the promises we made to millions of people, it erodes the soft power partnerships that the U.S. had built over the years and drives them into partnerships with adversaries like Russia and China," Enrich warns.
State Department cables sent last week push host nations to sign a "trade over aid" declaration rejecting America's role as the top humanitarian provider in favor of business arrangements for U.S. companies. The contrast with Kennedy's original vision is stark, though Enrich notes even that vision served Cold War interests in countering Soviet influence.
Enrich believes USAID can be restored if there is political will. "The folks who say it's gone and can't be brought back lack boldness and imagination," he says. Rebuilding would require acknowledging that development assistance is a separate, essential component of foreign policy, distinct from diplomacy or military action.
For Enrich, the deeper lesson involves recognizing when to speak up. His book arrives as many struggle with where the line between compliance and resistance should be drawn. "At some point I realized that if I didn't speak up from my position as a government official it was just going to be too late," he says. "This was not an attempt to realign foreign aid in a way that made sense. This was a group of people who did not know what the agency did but really did not know or care what it was they were tearing apart."
Author James Rodriguez: "Enrich's account reads like a cautionary tale about what happens when ideology and incompetence collide at scale, but it also serves as a reminder that institutional knowledge matters and that some institutions, once dismantled, cannot easily be rebuilt."
Comments